How we decide
This tracker makes claims that businesses act on. This page sets out what we require of a source, what our status words mean, where we are deliberately stricter than other trackers, and what we do not yet do.
A citation has to substantiate the specific claim it is attached to, not the general topic. A country's tax-authority homepage is not a source for a date, a threshold or a penalty; the notice, resolution or statute that sets them is.
We prefer the government or authority text over anyone's summary of it. Where the only reachable source is a professional tracker or an advisory firm, the claim still carries that source rather than a better-looking one, and we treat it as weaker evidence.
This standard was written after auditing our own citations and finding that most did not meet it. 121 milestone sources and 99 story sources were corrected as a result.
Where we could not confirm a fact, we say so and record why. We do not leave it blank and we do not infer it, because a blank reads as "no requirement" — a different claim, and the one that gets somebody fined.
Right now 12 of the 385 headline facts we publish are recorded as not confirmed.
Every jurisdiction we track carries the same five facts: the e-invoicing obligation for business-to-government, business-to-business and business-to-consumer transactions, the archiving period, and whether a digital signature is required.
This is the single rule that most often makes us disagree with other trackers. Being obliged to receive an e-invoice is not the same as being obliged to send one, and only the second changes what a business has to build.
So where public bodies must accept e-invoices but suppliers may still send paper, we record no mandate and say why underneath. Ireland, Cyprus, Malta and the United Kingdom are all read this way. Where suppliers to government must issue electronically — Germany, Denmark, Sweden — we record an active mandate.
The duty to receive is never dropped. It is stated in the line under the status, because a business that can only receive still has something to prepare for.
A draft bill is not a plan. We record a scheduled mandate only where an instrument has been adopted and a date set — so a country with a proposal before its parliament reads as having no mandate here and as "planned" on some other trackers.
The effect is that we sometimes publish a less exciting answer than the market does. That is the point. A compliance sheet that overstates an obligation costs a reader budget and attention they did not need to spend.
Every source we cite is graded on who is answering. The grade belongs to the publisher, not to the page: a summary of a law is a summary of a law, however good it is.
1436 citations across 448 publishers, every one of them graded. Nothing can be published on this site citing a publisher that has not been graded — the build refuses it.
The ROI planner grades every benchmark it uses from A to D and shows the grade beside the number, because the published evidence for e-invoicing savings is much weaker than the figures in circulation suggest. Our own review of 47 sources found no measured post-mandate study of accounts-payable cost anywhere in the world.
Every change to the five headline statuses is on the record, with what it said before, when it changed and why — and a correction on our side is recorded separately from a mandate that moved, because a reader is entitled to know which of the two they are looking at. A status cannot change without the change being recorded: the build refuses it.
The grade above belongs to the publisher, not to the individual citation. A page on a government domain is graded primary even if it is a blog post there, and a statute reproduced verbatim by a law firm is graded secondary. No citation we hold has needed an exception yet; when one does, it will get one.
The record covers the five headline statuses and nothing else. Milestones, the notes under each status and the prose on a country's cards change too, and those changes are not yet kept — they live only in the versioned migration history, where nothing is lost but nothing is readable either.
Mandates move and we get things wrong. If a fact on this site does not match what you are being told locally, we would rather hear it than not — a correction with a source attached is the most useful thing anyone sends us.
Send a correction The sources we monitor
Covering 77 jurisdictions. Last fact-check recorded 2026-09-04.